I'm sure if I jiggered the search terms, I could find news stories of this type dating back to the 1980s. What you don't hear is that we graduate 50 percent more IT and engineering students than the market will absorb, thanks to the corporations' unwillingness to end offshoring/using foreign techs on H-1B visas.

It's probably going to take another 5-10 years for us to figure out what might be a real trend, and what is merely an effect of the recession. Also, the recession may have unexpected consequences; so far, some students (and their parents) seem to be becoming even more desperately careerist, while others, seeing where desperate careerism is leading (e.g. to a newly-minted law degree and 100K+ in debt and no job) are actually interested in thinking about the meaning of life, or at least rethinking the larger structures of the economy (cf. the Occupy movement). It will be interesting to see where it all leads. The Great Depression was, of course, followed by WWII, so it's not (at least I hope not) really a model.

And a nicely-done reply to the WSJ piece (the basic point is that it matters where you set the baseline; humanities enrollments were unusually *high* c. 1970; the overall post-WWII decline is pretty gradual, especially when you keep in mind that whole new majors/fields of study, most of them in the STEM areas, have been created in the interim). Thanks to Flavia for pointing the way to this one on her blog .

What Was This?

College Misery was a dysfunctional group blog where professors got the chance to release some of the frustration that built up while tending to student snowflakes, helicopter parents, money mad Deans, envious colleagues, and churlish chairpeople.

Our parent site, Rate Your Students, started in 2005, and we continued that mission beginning in 2010. Ben at Academic Water Torture and Kimmie at The Apoplectic Mizery Maker both ran support blogs during periods when this blog had died.